The real estate industry in this country is going through turbulent times. After three years of hefty increases, prices have stabilized.
After years of acute shortage of building land, the Housing Ministry and the Israel Lands Authority have increased the sale of building land. And after years of silence, the government is stressing the need to bring down prices, especially at these times of social unrest.
The current social unrest was caused in great part by the hefty real estate prices, but why did housing prices rise so sharply? What were the price trends in the past 10 years? Nissim Bublil, president of the Association of Contractors and Builders in Israel, says that real estate prices have risen sharply since 2008.
“The price of real estate rose from a national average of NIS 640,000 for an apartment in 2000 to NIS 1.1 million in June of this year. This is a substantial increase, but one must deduct the rise in the CPI during this period and the hefty rises in the last four years.
According to figures published by the Housing Ministry, ‘real’ real
estate prices during 2000-2008 actually fell, while ‘real’ prices during
the last four years rose by nearly 35 percent.
The hefty rise in real estate prices occurred since 2008, and this is
due to the shortage of housing. In contrast to the increase in prices in
the US and Europe in the period prior to the sub prime crisis which
were speculative in nature, prices in Israel rose because there was not
enough housing to go around,” he says.
And that was the crux of the problem – an acute shortage of housing.
Since 1998, annual housing starts have fallen below the annual number of
new households being created in Israel. In 2010 the number of new
households and the number of housing starts were equal, but in the
preceding 12 years annual housing starts were below the number of annual
households created that year.
Consequently, there is an accumulated shortage of 70,000 dwellings.
The government wants prices to go down, but as Bublil, explains this is
easier said than done because building costs make up only 31% of the
price of the apartments. Everything else is beyond the control of the
developer.
“The price of land makes up 34.1% of the cost, and most of the land is
sold by the government through the Israel Lands Authority. An additional
51.9% is made up of taxes. This leaves the investor with a gross profit
of only 13.0%, part of which he has to put aside to buy land, which is
the grassroots of any real estate developer.”
One must take into account that the process of planning and executing a building project takes many years, and time is money.
Despite the fact that the price of real estate has risen sharply and
with it, profits, the amount of money needed to buy land is increasing
all the time.
The developers need a profit margin of at least 13% to survive.
According to Bublil, the increase in real estate prices is affecting the developers and contractors.
“The biggest problem we have is our inability to build less expensive
apartments because when large segments of the population cannot afford
the prices, it means our customer base is smaller, and that is not good
for business. Many of the reasons for the high real estate prices are
government motivated and from their point of view, they are perfectly
logical. The Treasury is right in that it tries to squeeze as much money
as possible from the real estate industry to finance government
activity. The Israel Lands Authority is acting correctly when it wants
to charge the highest price possible for the land it is selling
developers. The planning authorities are acting correctly when they
check and double check each project. The environmental groups are trying
to protect the environment, and the defense minister wants every
shelter to have a built-in filtering system.
All these regulations have their reasons, but they add hundreds of
thousands of shekels to the price of an apartment,” he explains.
The government is trying to overcome the shortage of housing by
increasing the land being made available to the developers. But this is
not having the desired effect for two reasons: lack of bank credit
financing due to government regulations and a shortage of construction
workers. In the second quarter of 2011, there was a drop of 2.5% in
housing starts because of that, and housing completions are lagging
behind housing starts because of the shortage of trained construction
workers.
As Bublil explains, “There is a shortage of 20,000 construction workers.
For the past 40 years, the majority of construction workers were
Palestinians and foreigners. At these times there are only 5,000
overseas workers. We have an agreement with the government that at any
given time we will have permits to employ 8,000 overseas construction
workers. But this agreement is not being implemented because the
government has not agreed on the country of origin of these workers. But
even if these 8,000 were miraculously to materialize, there would not
be enough. The prime minister wants to increase housing starts by tens
of thousands a year, and for that we need more construction workers. It
cannot be done with the available workforce,” he says.